Yet another climate post, but like my previous ones, this isn’t really about climate, it’s about science and it’s current state. Everyone by now has read about the leaked emails and source code (source followup here) last week. It’s a big deal.
There was a NY Times post today about a scientist who addresses skeptics. She listed three approaches a scientist can take when confronted by skeptics:
- Retreat into the ivory tower
- Circle the wagons/point guns outward: ad hominem/appeal to motive attacks; appeal to authority; isolate the enemny through lack of access to data; peer review process
- Take the “high ground:” engage the skeptics on our own terms (conferences, blogosphere); make data/methods available/transparent; clarify the uncertainties; openly declare our values
The Climate Research Unit went for #2, the scientist in the article believes that #3 is the best way (I agree), and this got me thinking about where skeptics come from in the first place, and how to deal with them.
Issue 1: open data will help honest and intelligent skeptics
One of the reasons I become skeptical about a some scientific and medical research is because the authors hide the data and they won’t make their methods known. I’m not a scientist by training, but I have some background in critical thinking and statistics. I’m not a stupid person (deliberately, anyway). If you show me the numbers and tell me how you interpret them, I can better judge your results.
Which leads to point 2:
Issue 2: stop averaging people
“Skeptics are willfully ignorant of the scientific method and religiously cling to unfounded beliefs in the face of contrary data.”
Ok, you see my point? I’ll spell it out for the above mentioned skeptic: not all skeptics are created equally. Smart scientists know this, of course. And smart skeptics know that not all scientists are created equally.
Scientists who follow methods 1 and 2 above are not helping the cause of science. Whenever we use non-scientific tools (such as “consensus,” which is just large scale appeal to authority), we’re not helping the intelligent-but-ignorant skeptic join us, and intelligent people know the difference between a good argument and a bad one.
I understand the frustration when dealing with the hopelessly stupid skeptic—these people are never going to change their minds no matter what evidence you present to them; they should just be ignored.
But please don’t ignore the honest skeptic, the fellow who is simply begging for the straight evidence. A good scientist is also a good communicator, who can take the data and explain it clearly to another intelligent and honest seeker of understanding.
If you have good data, why not share it? If you have iffy data, for the sake of good science, share it too, and we’ll all be wiser.
posted on Sat, 28 Nov 2009 at 07:39 | permanent link | view comments
I’ve been researching the effectiveness of flu vaccines lately, since everybody keeps asking me if I’m going to get one. I sometimes ask, “Are they effective?” and the response is always “Well, I got one last year and I didn’t get the flu.” After reading “How to read articles about health and healthcare”, I began to wonder if this flu vaccination thing smells right.
We hear endless news stories quoting doctors:
State Health Commissioner Dr. Karen Remley, a Virginia pediatrician, recommends the shot as basic prevention. She’s concerned about what it can cause.
“Flu is one of the leading causes of death in our country,” she says. “Over 36,000 people die every year in our country and it’s preventable by getting the flu shot.”
([cbn.com])[1]
We could really save 36,000 people’s lives if they only got the flu shot? That’s remarkable. What worries me when I hear news organizations quoting people who aren’t experts in the research they’re purporting to cover in their “story” is that everybody buys into it without thinking. “Look at me, I’m a trained physician with a white coat and stethoscope around my neck—I went to school and you can trust me!”
I worry in the back of my mind that the bulk of “science” out there has come from bad scientists. Odds are, it has. Odds are that most of the research out there was done by mediocre scientists or scientists who are looking to get published, and so they’ll do research trying to fit the data to existing studies, because that’s an easy way to get published: find existing research, copy it as best you can making sure the results match, submit to journals. “We can confirm that flu vaccination cuts the risk of death to those who received it in half, compared to those who didn’t.”
This reminds me of another recent article that turned the “lactic acid in muscles is bad for you” science upside down. True or false: When you work out, lactic acid builds up in your muscles. If too much builds up, you start getting fatigued.
It used to be true, but now it’s false, it turns out. Lactic acid is fuel your muscles use to create more energy. Who knew? (nytimes.com)
At any rate, the flu thing began to bother me in the same way.
The data
The first thing I did was looked at studies or meta-studies of flu vaccine effectiveness: what is the measured benefit of flu vaccination in the real-world? We all know that polio and other (non-morphing) diseases have been virtually eradicated because of vaccination. This should work for flu, too, right?
Not entirely. The plain language summary for a 2007 metastudy concluded:
There is not enough evidence to decide whether routine vaccination to prevent influenza in healthy adults is effective.
The review of trials found vaccinations against influenza avoided 80% of cases at best (in those confirmed by laboratory tests, and using vaccines directed against circulating strains), but only 50% when the vaccine did not match, and 30% against influenza-like illness, in healthy adults. It did not change the number of people needing to go to hospital or take time off work.
([wiley.com])[2] (emphasis mine)
So, it’s effective against the precisely matching strain. How often does that occur? Here’s the CDC’s answer (read the second section carefully):
How is influenza vaccine effectiveness measured?
Vaccine efficacy and effectiveness studies use various endpoints or outcomes, which influence how we interpret the results. These endpoints may include the prevention of medically attended acute respiratory illness (MAARI), prevention of laboratory-confirmed influenza virus illness or hospitalization, prevention of influenza-like illness (ILI, such as illness with fever and cough or sore throat), or influenza-associated hospitalizations or deaths.
Studies that use outcomes such as an influenza laboratory-confirmed outcome provide the most specific estimates of the impact of the vaccine in preventing influenza. The more non-specific the outcome being measured (e.g., all pneumonia hospitalizations or influenza-like illness that include many illnesses not caused by the influenza virus), the lower the estimates of vaccine effectiveness. For example, a study by Bridges et al. (JAMA 2000) among healthy adults found that the inactivated influenza was 86% effective against laboratory-confirmed influenza, but only 10% effectiveness against all respiratory illnesses in the same population and year.
In other words, while 86% of the time you’ll avoid the strain you were vaccinated against, only 10% of the time you’ll avoid the flu. What’s really happening is this: there are dozens, possibly scores of viruses out there every year. Some are flu strains, most are not. Many of these viruses cause the same flu-like symptoms (fever, aches, chills, cough, sore throat, etc.) and your odds of resisting all of these in any given flu season with a flu vaccination is 1 in 10.
That’s not terribly effective.
More Research
This month’s The Atlantic came out with an interesting article that goes even further, citing a variety of reputable researchers who claim that all of the studies indicating that people who get the flu shot are half as likely to die as those who don’t get the flu shot are probably the effect of cohort bias (i.e., typically only health-minded people elect to get the flu shot; this group is already half as likely to die as those who aren’t health-minded).
Here’s one lone voice in the wilderness:
Nonetheless, in 2004, Jackson and three colleagues set out to determine whether the mortality difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated might be caused by a phenomenon known as the “healthy user effect.” They hypothesized that on average, people who get vaccinated are simply healthier than those who don’t, and thus less liable to die over the short term. People who don’t get vaccinated may be bedridden or otherwise too sick to go get a shot. They may also be more likely to succumb to flu or any other illness, because they are generally older and sicker. To test their thesis, Jackson and her colleagues combed through eight years of medical data on more than 72,000 people 65 and older. They looked at who got flu shots and who didn’t. Then they examined which group’s members were more likely to die of any cause when it was not flu season.
Jackson’s findings showed that outside of flu season, the baseline risk of death among people who did not get vaccinated was approximately 60 percent higher than among those who did, lending support to the hypothesis that on average, healthy people chose to get the vaccine, while the “frail elderly” didn’t or couldn’t. In fact, the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all. Jackson’s papers “are beautiful,” says Lone Simonsen, who is a professor of global health at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., and an internationally recognized expert in influenza and vaccine epidemiology. “They are classic studies in epidemiology, they are so carefully done.”
The results were also so unexpected that many experts simply refused to believe them. Jackson’s papers were turned down for publication in the top-ranked medical journals. One flu expert who reviewed her studies for the Journal of the American Medical Association wrote, “To accept these results would be to say that the earth is flat!” When the papers were finally published in 2006, in the less prominent International Journal of Epidemiology, they were largely ignored by doctors and public-health officials. “The answer I got,” says Jackson, “was not the right answer.”
There’s tons more in this article I won’t spoil for you. The point is, that most scientists stink at doing real science. I didn’t really want to say that or believe it. I want to believe that the men and women in lab coats and protective eyewear are serious-minded people, who have turned their back on wealth and prestige for the greater good of research and knowledge.
But I’m beginning to see that they’re kind of like everybody else in the world: you have a tiny group of hard-core awesome passionate people who are willing to sacrifice their social standing for the sake of the truth, and a vast herd of group-thinkers smart enough to play the game but not smart enough to realize that the real game is one you play against yourself, and where everybody else wins because you play.
posted on Sat, 24 Oct 2009 at 23:32 | permanent link | view comments
I’ve been saying it for a while: students learn better with qualified, caring teachers and quality teaching materials than anything else, and One-Laptop-Per-Child is an expensive distraction from real education.
I think everyone who has been educated knows this instinctively. We can all point to a mentor (a teacher, a parent, a caring friend) who guided us, encouraged us, and cared enough about us to help us learn what is worth learning and what is not worth learning.
Giving a child a laptop does neither of these things. Some argue that simply having access to information will be the child’s ticket to a bright future, but now that the results are in, we can finally stop beating this dead horse.
You will always find exceptions: highly motivated students will learn no matter what you do to them, and giving them access to a computer will certainly give them an opportunity to get the information they want faster; but for the majority of students, giving them a computer will do little good, and will often do much harm, to their education.
The Internet is not a discriminator of information, and this is its chief problem. A classically-based education, as an example, imposes a hierarchy on knowledge. It says, “These things are more important than those things.” And when I say “it” I really mean a classically trained teacher guiding a student through a classical curriculum.
The Internet can’t do that for you by itself. You still need a guide, a mentor of some kind to help you know what’s worth learning. Autodidacts learn this early on and quickly learn which voices in life they want to trust (generally by way of books and other reading material), but the rest of us simply don’t know where to go.
And while we’re on the topic of online learning, did you hear of the recent meta-study by the US Department of Education? Everybody in the tech world is feeling validated, but they shouldn’t. It claims:
The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.
Read the study and notice that it’s a meta-study, largely sampling the results of self-selecting, uncontrolled learning experiements. Highly-motivated students, the kind who opt to take online courses, will always perform better than unmotivated students, no matter what medium they’re using.
The abstract concludes:
Analysts noted that these blended conditions often included additional learning time and instructional elements not received by students in control conditions. This finding suggests that the positive effects associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the media, per se. An unexpected finding was the small number of rigorous published studies contrasting online and face-to-face learning conditions for K–12 students. In light of this small corpus, caution is required in generalizing to the K–12 population because the results are derived for the most part from studies in other settings (e.g., medical training, higher education).
(emphasis mine).
So don’t take this as a validation for K-12 computer learning. Additional studies over OLPC and K-12 computer learning aren’t encouraging:
Under the auspices of the No Child Left Behind Act, the U.S. Department of Education and Mathematica Policy Research recently completed a rigorous, two-year test of reading and math software (using programs that had at least some nonexperimental evidence that they “worked”) in dozens of school districts nationwide. With one minor exception, the studies found that children using the software scored no better than peers who did not have access to the software.
and this:
Economists Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches studied a program in Romania that distributed discount vouchers for the purchase of home computers to low-income families. When they compared the families that used the vouchers to acquire computers with families that were just above the income cut-off to receive the vouchers, they found that computers had a negative effect on students’ grades and educational goals.
and this:
(Leigh) Linden (an economist at Columbia University) also led one of the few experimental studies to show a positive impact from the use of computers — a project in India that provided computers and education software to schools and randomly assigned some schools to use the software during school hours and others to encourage computer use after hours. This study found that using computers during school hours-—essentially substituting computers for teachers—actually hurt learning, while using them after hours as a supplement to traditional classroom teaching had dramatic positive effects on the weakest students. Even this outcome doesn’t really support the OLPC mission, though; the software evaluated is very much in the “drill and practice” model that Negroponte has explicitly derided.
I won’t spoil all the fun of this article, but there are far, far better and less expensive ways to improve education than giving a child a laptop. In developing countries the list includes deworming children, providing tutors, and creating more private schools.
In the United States, computers in classrooms and schools should be removed and with the money not spent on technology, hire additional teachers or give the existing teachers a raise. I’m certain we’d get more of what we’re really looking for.
posted on Thu, 10 Sep 2009 at 11:36 | permanent link | view comments
Another good one from Jessica Hagy.
posted on Wed, 02 Sep 2009 at 13:30 | permanent link | view comments
Politics and the English Language
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.
Anyone? Anyone? George Orwell, 1946 [link]. Read on:
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.
My own experience tells me that bad writing is always a result of one of two factors: 1) the author is uneducated and doesn’t know how to write or 2) the author is lazy.
The first problem can be solved with practice and hard work: anyone can learn to write well if they’ll care enough to read what they’ve written and change it until the words are right. Good elementary and secondary school teachers who understand and can teach this are as angels from heaven. The second problem is solved when the intended audience stops reading and goes elsewhere.
posted on Tue, 25 Aug 2009 at 10:23 | permanent link | view comments
Remember a few weeks ago when I griped about global warming? What bothered me wasn’t that we have fringe groups, conspiracy theorists, and “deniers.” These folks will always be with us in everything (sometimes they’re even right).
What bothered me was that there seems to be a legitimate case against the predominant view and few scientists in the mainstream are addressing it directly and scientifically. Almost nobody from the scientific “consensus” community are taking these people on, rather they’re using name-calling and ostracism to maintain their position. It also bothers me that scientists feel they have to stoop to “consensus” and PR smear campaigns to make their point.
Consensus is fine—great—for some things, but not in science:
If the brightest minds on Wall Street got suckered by group-think into believing house prices would never fall, what other policies founded on consensus wisdom could be waiting to come unraveled? Global warming, you say? You mean it might be harder to model climate change 20 years ahead than house prices 5 years ahead? Surely not—how could so many climatologists be wrong?
What’s wrong with consensuses is not the establishment of a majority view, which is necessary and legitimate, but the silencing of skeptics. “We still have whole domains we can’t talk about,” Dr. Bouchard said, referring to the psychology of differences between races and sexes.
(tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com)
I would argue that there are even more things than psychology that aren’t being talked about, including climate change, because of this fear of consensus. Politicians and business-types are the kinds of people who look for consensus of opinion—that’s because they don’t actually know or do anything. They mobilize opinion to get other people to actually think or do. But scientists are different—they’re doers. Science is for observing, gathering, analyzing and interpreting data with confidence intervals. Maybe come up with a theory. Scientific disagreements should be about the data and its interpretation, not posturing and raspberry-blowing.
Scientists are of course entitled to have opinions as much as the next op-ed writer, but a scientist is expected to have some rigor and discipline when engaging in and refuting arguments. More importantly, a scientist is expected to be a thinker capable of ignoring the ridicule of his or her peers to get to the truth of a matter.
An article in the New York Times recently wrote about how Groupthink might be the culprit of our financial crisis (read: “collapse”):
In his classic 1972 book, Groupthink, Irving L. Janis, the Yale psychologist, explained how panels of experts could make colossal mistakes. People on these panels, he said, are forever worrying about their personal relevance and effectiveness, and feel that if they deviate too far from the consensus, they will not be given a serious role. They self-censor personal doubts about the emerging group consensus if they cannot express these doubts in a formal way that conforms with apparent assumptions held by the group.
(I think Peter Schiff would agree.)
When scientists bond together and form a consensus, science itself is imperiled. Because scientists are human and care about what their peers think, they take a big risk of stifling creative, scientific thought. Science is, at its core, the opposite of what we achieve by consensus. Science needs naysayers and village idiots every bit as much as the respectable, well-groomed, mainstream thinkers.
Paul Graham wrote an essay called “What you can’t say” that puts it even better:
Of course, we’re not just looking for things we can’t say. We’re looking for things we can’t say that are true, or at least have enough chance of being true that the question should remain open. But many of the things people get in trouble for saying probably do make it over this second, lower threshold. No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.
Another way of putting it is Bob Sutton’s “strong opinions, weakly held.” Whatever we call it, it’s something more scientists need to learn apparently. We’re not in high school anymore, and any scientist who puts popularity and peer acceptance ahead of their scientific rigor, even in their spare time, is doing more harm than good.
posted on Fri, 24 Jul 2009 at 16:59 | permanent link | view comments
[Note: You can skip the next 6 paragraphs or so to the mildly amusing anecdote if you don’t like my seemingly endless diatribes. If you don’t like my mildly amusing anecdotes either, you can jump right to the final 4 or 5 paragraphs and enjoy my grandiose moralizing.]
When I bought my scooter last March, a lot of people asked about it. What kind is it? Is it fast? What kind of mileage do you get? Where’s the clutch? Can I ride it? (answers: “a Genuine Buddy”, “60-65 mph on a straightaway”, “90-ish mpg”, “it’s a continuous clutch—just twist and go”, and “no.”).
(a photograph of my erstwhile office)
But the best question has been, “Why did you buy that scooter and not some other kind?” I’ve mostly handwaved my way through that question with something like “I researched it for two years” yadda, yadda, yadda. It’s true that other people who have owned multiple scooters really like it, and that influenced me. There’s also the great support group and local service shop. But every major brand has its loyal following: these reasons are not completely unique to my scooter.
Not-China
In reality, you’re fairly safe with any scooter from not-China: Kymco, Honda, Yamaha, Genuine, Sym, Lambretta, Bajaj, etc. These are all good brands that have been around for a long time. The Chinese scooters you see for sale on every other corner of major thoroughfares are what the cognoscenti call “disposable scooters.” They usually offer 90 day warranties, which I’m told you’re lucky to make it through without incident. If you go to any scooter shop that’s been around for more than a year or two, you’ll find dozens of these sub-$1000 disposables in the junkyard behind the shop and none for sale in the shop itself.
The owners and mechanics of good scooter shops will tell you what the Chinese scooters are made of: $%*#@! In layman’s terms, this means they’re made of inexpensive plastic parts and poor quality, brittle metals that are not designed to last long under heat or stress. They’re the scooter equivalent pressboard furniture: it may do just fine for you if you don’t move it far or often. And keep it out of the rain.
[I’m not bagging on China. I love China (sometimes). Most of the nice things I own were assembled in or have parts from China. But Chinese-made scooters are terrible. Ride a few of them and then ride something from the list above and you’ll see what I mean. Talk to scooter mechanics, ask around. There’s a reason they’re so cheap.]
Another reason I bought a Buddy was the 2 year warranty and roadside assistance (at no extra cost). I always thought roadside assistance was for sissies. I’d never needed it for my car (I somehow always managed to find a phone and call someone), but today I was proven wrong. I am proud to say that roadside assistance is awesome.
Story time: gather ‘round!
I’m cruising north on Geneva Road this afternoon. A dump truck in the left lane and an 18-wheeler ahead of me in the right lane. The truck in my lane is drifting occasionally into the shoulder and stirring up a lot of dust and gravel. My face is being pelted with little objects, so I start to slow a little and BAM and then rat-tat-tat-tat-tat over and over. Something is making a terrible noise in my rear wheel. I slow down and pull off the road. The rat-tat-tat stops, but I dismount to see what’s going on.
Protruding from the rear tire is about a half-inch of a rusty nail. Crud. Air is already hissing from the tire, so I pull the whole thing out. Three-freaking-inches of nail. It was nearly all the way in. Crud. I think I can make it another quarter mile—maybe.
I turn on the hazard blinkers and creep along the shoulder until I get to the next gas station. I can feel the rear tire is completely flat before I get there, so I walk it from the curb to the building and park it on the sidewalk in front of the store. A nice guy on a skateboard mentions a scooter shop nearby (which isn’t there anymore actually, but he didn’t know that, so I just thanked him). We chat a little bit. Then I remember a month or so ago getting my roadside assistance card in the mail:
I call the number, and a pleasant voice asks, “Are you in a safe location?” Sweet. “You bet I am.”
In another minute she’s asked for my policy number and verified all of my information. She asks for my location and where I want it towed. I walk into the air-conditioned convenience store to get out of the 90°+ heat. The guy with the skateboard is charging his cell phone from an outlet behind the garbage can. “Things ok?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “I remembered I have roadside assistance.”
“Awesome!” he says. Then he turns away to make a call now that he’s got some juice in his phone.
15 minutes later and the tow truck is there. I sign a paper saying that Larry’s Towing has my scooter. In 30 minutes the truck is on its way to The Scooter Lounge (“the best scooter shop in the universe!”). No charge for any of this—it’s all part of the package. For 2 years. It also covers car rental, but I don’t need that today (I’m hanging out at the gas station’s convenience store writing this until my wife picks me up).
Back to quality
But this essay isn’t really about scooters and flat tires. It’s about quality. There are companies that care first about what they do, and there are companies that care first about making money. Some folks think that you can do the latter without doing the former, and I think in the short term they’re often right: you can fool some of the people some of the time.
While most people care about quality in something, whether it’s the TV shows they watch or the beer they drink, many people don’t seem to care about quality in most things. They’re going to buy the cheapest things over and over, rather than wait and save up for something better. It just doesn’t matter to them.
I don’t know if there’s any correlation between people who don’t care about using quality things and people who don’t care about creating quality things (or doing quality work) but I know that people who care about making quality almost universally appreciate it in the things they use themselves: their cars, homes, food, clothing, music, furniture, plumbing, computers, software, tools, and even scooters.
This is not to say that everything we have must be the best. We make do with many things and budget constraints often force us to temper what’s important to us. But the things that are important should be of adequate quality to give satisfaction.
It’s also important to keep in mind that tastes change over time, often for the better: what was satisfying to you at one time may not satisfy you later on (e.g., making dough by hand used to be great, but a Bosch makes making bread oh-so-much more fun). Having quality nearby makes making more quality enjoyable.
posted on Wed, 22 Jul 2009 at 23:48 | permanent link | view comments
Goodbye QuickSilvεr, Hello Google Quick Search + Proxi + Growl!
I’ve been a fan of QuickSilvεr for years. It’s played a significant role in my life on OS X and I’ve gotten to know and love most of its quirks, crashes, and instabilities. But no more! I’ve found a new love and I’m kicking you out, you beautiful fiend.
My new love is a trio of programs: Google Quick Search Box, Proxi, and Growl. Everyone knows how cool Growl is and probably has it installed, but Google Quick Search and Proxi might be new to some folks. I’ll go through the changes I’ve made in moving from Quicksilvεr to my new trio.
Quicksilvεr is cool
If you’re a QS user like me, what attracted you to QS in the first place was the elegance and the economy. With as few keystrokes as you could want, you can accomplish common, useful things. And QS just makes your Mac feel really cool, even when it’s starting up:
But we need a little something new every once in a while.
Quicksilvεr’s slow demise
Even the hardiest fans of Quicksilvεr must admit that it’s suffered greatly in author Nicholas Jitkoff’s absence. It hasn’t had a significant update for months; the last stable release was at the end of 2007. It has some memory corruption problems that manifest themselves by the icons disappearing and the triggers stop working after about a week. I haven’t minded restarting QS, knowing that this is the price to pay for such useful software, but recently I started wondering if there wasn’t anything else out there yet.
I tried Google’s Quick Search Box for OS X last year (also written by
Nicholas Jitkoff, who is now a Google employee), but it wasn’t ready
for prime time. I’d also used Proxi off and on for trigger-related
events that I couldn’t get to work in Quicksilvεr, but it also seemed
to get wedged occasionally (note: Proxi still hangs occasionally after
closing iTunes), remedied only by a kill or waiting a while.
But with the latest releases of GQSB (2.0.0.1147) and Proxi (1.5), I think I’ve found the perfect combination for what I used to do in QS.
If you haven’t yet, go get a copy of Google Quick Search Box (GQSB) and Proxi and install them. We’ll look at GQSB first.
Google Quick Search Box
Here’s how I set mine up. I’m an emacs user, so I can never have
^-Space for my launch trigger. If you don’t use emacs, you might enjoy
a little more pinky room there. In any case, once I turned off
Quicksilvεr, I had my old ⌥-Space keystroke freed up for GQSB. Let’s
look at the first preference page:
I turned off the ⌘+⌘ key trigger after an hour; I’d already found that I accidentally seem to hit that key combo a little too often.
Here’s the second pane:
I’m a bit of a privacy freak, so I turned off the Google searches. With these enabled, this little tool becomes a little too powerful for me. It’s kind of scary, but for the fearless, you’re going to flip out at how slick this is.
In the “Under the Hood” section, change these to suit your tastes. I’m sure I’ll continue tweaking these for a while (scroll down if you only see one option):
Now we’ve got a new search/launch tool installed! However, if you’re like me, you’ve added a lot of triggers and AppleScripts to QS and really miss the shortcuts. It’s important to bear in mind that GQSB is only a search tool and launcher; it doesn’t have triggers like Quicksilvεr does. For those we now introduce Proxi.
Proxi
Proxi definitely took its cue from Quicksilvεr when it came to superfluous effects:
Proxi is obviously a self-serving bit of software for Griffin Technology, which hasn’t fully been able to engage the larger development community behind it. Fortunately, they’ve put enough useful general-purpose, non-Griffin functionality in it to make a truly useful tool.
Proxi is a really only a trigger manager at heart, but it does a decent job of it. Here we’re going to take an old trigger from our Quicksilvεr setup and do the same thing in Proxi. Here’s the trigger in Quicksilvεr:
This trigger launches an AppleScript, that launches Stick ‘Em Up, my favorite sticky program by Jim McGowan.
Now open the Proxi Editor by clicking the gear icon in your menu bar:
And make a new trigger:
I’m going to call it “run stick ‘em’ up”. When you select the new trigger in the left panel, on the far right panel you’ll see the settings for this new trigger. Here is where you assign the hotkeys. I’m using ⌘⌥^-S in this case:
Now we add a new task to this trigger. You can add multiple tasks to a trigger if you want:
One excellent thing Proxi can do is to run Applescripts inline. Here we make a launcher for an application:
That’s all! Just close the Proxi Editor and it’s running.
Proxi still suffers from some lag occasionally; I haven’t found any kind of consistent pattern to it, but by and large I haven’t had much trouble with the latest 1.5 update.
Fin
Between Proxi for the common hotkey shortcuts and Google Quick Search Box for the blazing fast hard-drive searches (and I use Growl to listen for iTunes track changes, just like Quicksilvεr used to do for me), I’m back in the saddle in under an hour.
posted on Tue, 07 Jul 2009 at 12:59 | permanent link | view comments
http://www.therereallyisnosecret.com/
Now get to it.
posted on Wed, 01 Jul 2009 at 14:40 | permanent link | view comments
Whenever you adopt science as your religion, you should be prepared to deal with the atheists, agnostics, and general skeptics with grace, civility, and respect. Those who fail to do this do not deserve the honorable title of scientist.
The world is full of plenty of things to believe and plenty to doubt, and a real scientist withholds judgement on both sides, knowing that the jury is always out in the face of new evidence.
Scientists who have signed up to turn climate change science into climate change dogma by ridiculing or ostracizing any nay-sayers are giving all true scientists a black eye. Science is about open and honest inquiry. Leave the political jockeying to lesser minds.
Wall Street Journal: Climate change is changing.
posted on Fri, 26 Jun 2009 at 10:36 | permanent link | view comments